Trace (Trace 1) (16 page)

Trace stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and went into the room. Should he have told Matteson that Carey had said that “they” were trying to kill him?

Maybe not. Not yet.

Mrs. Carey was still standing at the end of the bed, her lips moving gently. The pair of pajamas, gray-and-red-striped cotton, were lying on the bed, and they looked pathetic to Trace, like a Christmas-tree ornament abandoned in the middle of some dirty slum street.

“Do you want to come home, Mitchell? Oh, I wish you could answer me. Muffy’s such a help. It’s almost like having Buffy home again. I wish you could tell me if you want to come home…It’s all right, I’m going to talk to Buffy tonight and I’m going to ask her. She’ll tell me what’s best to do.”

She noticed Trace at the door and smiled to him, then turned back toward her husband.

At that moment, there was a gasp from Carey’s lips. An eerie groaning sound, that ended in an explosive “No.” And then his head fell to one side on the pillow.

Trace ran to the man’s side, looked at him, and knew he was looking into the face of death. He remembered Matteson and barked, “Muffy, take care of Mrs. Carey.” He ran out of the room and hurried down the hall, slamming open doors, looking inside. He found Matteson talking to a patient.

“Doc, a problem. Carey.”

“I’ll be right back,” Matteson said to a nurse, and turned toward Trace.

“Hurry.”

Trace held the door to Carey’s room open for the doctor, who rushed by him and to the man’s side. He felt in the throat for a pulse, then put his head to the man’s chest.

He turned to Trace and said, “Tell the nurse I want ten ccs of epinephrine. Right now.” Without waiting for a response, he turned back to the man. Mrs. Carey was still standing, alone, at the end of the bed, her moans a soft keening sound in the room.

Trace went back to the room where he had found Matteson.

“Ten ccs of epinephrine for Dr. Matteson. Room two-thirteen. On the double.” She nodded and ran past him. When Trace went back into Carey’s room, the doctor was on the bed, kneeling, with his legs on both sides of the old man’s body. He was pressing on his chest with steady thumping pressure, then releasing and starting again.

The striped pajamas had been thrown to the floor. Matteson repeated the chest pressure three times, then leaned forward, pinched Carey’s nostrils with his right hand, and softly blew air into the man’s mouth. He felt for the throat pulse again. He was mumbling under his breath.

“Breathe, goddammit, breathe. You’re not dying on me. Not now. Breathe.”

He straightened up and started pumping the chest again. He saw Trace at the door and yelled, “Where the hell’s that nurse? Tell her to get her ass moving.”

Trace went back into the hall. Behind him, he heard Matteson mumbling. “Oh, no. You’re not going to die. Not on me. Breathe, godammit, pull in life. Breathe. Breathe. You’ve got to live.”

The nurse was running down the hall toward Trace and he held the door open for her. She ran inside and handed Matteson a syringe. He ripped open Carey’s hospital robe, felt his ribs, then stabbed the needle through the chest wall into the heart. He handed the hypodermic back to the nurse and said, “Get the defibrillator. Hurry it up now.” His voice was hurried but gentle.

He pressed his left ear close to Carey’s chest, then began the steady pressure rhythmically on the chest again. “Little bit there. It’s coming, old-timer. Come on. Breathe with me. We’ve got that beat now. Pull in that air. Okay. Okay. Okay. You’re going to live. Goddammit, you hear me, you’re going to live. You’re not quitting on me now.”

Suddenly, Trace heard a big sip of air come through Mitchell Carey’s mouth.

“Attaboy,” Matteson said. “Keep it coming now.” He growled to Trace, “Give me that oxygen.”

Trace walked to the large light-green tank beside the bed, took the mask from atop it, and handed it to Matteson, who placed it over Carey’s nose and mouth, then snapped, “Well, turn it on.”

Trace shrugged in confusion, then saw the large backyard faucet-type valve next to the pressure indicator and turned it on.

“How much should it go?”

“Turn till I tell you to stop.”

Trace kept turning and Matteson said, “Okay, leave it there.”

The doctor sat back on his haunches and looked down at Carey. Trace could see the old man’s chest rising and falling slowly. Color seemed to be flooding back into his face. Matteson reached a finger for the throat and found the pulse, and as Trace watched him, he nodded. Mrs. Carey still stood at the foot of the bed, weeping softly, and Trace walked over and helped her to a chair.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said. He saw Muffy sitting in her chair, watching with interest. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was lifting a lighter toward it, and Trace slapped the cigarette away. “Leave that god-damn cigarette alone. There’s oxygen in this room.”

She looked at him, an annoyed expression on her face.

“You’re a big goddamn help,” Trace said, then walked back to the bed as George Matteson let out a long sigh and clambered down from the bed. He stood by Carey’s side, taking the pulse in his wrist and feeling his chest. He made a slight adjustment on his oxygen valve, sighed again, and walked over to Mrs. Carey, who looked at him expectantly.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Carey. I think he’ll be all right.”

Tears streamed down the old woman’s cheeks. “Can I…can I look at him?”

“Sure. Of course.” Matteson looked at Muffy and said sharply, “Help the lady.”

Muffy rose slowly from the chair and walked Mrs. Carey over to the bed where they stood looking at Mitchell Carey. The nurse reentered, wheeling an electrical-shock unit, and Matteson said, “We don’t need that now. Stay here and watch him.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“I need a cigarette.”

“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Trace said.

“I don’t. That’s why I need one,” the doctor said, and Trace followed him into the hall and lit a cigarette for him.

Matteson took a long, slow, deep drag and Trace said, “Good job in there.”

“Huh. Oh, yeah. Thanks. I—” He shook his head vigorously from side to side. “I can’t stand people dying on me. Dammit, they don’t have any right to.” He was looking at the floor and he took another puff of his cigarette, then glanced over at Trace. “Anyway, now you know how sometimes people just have a heart attack and die.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you were there and got me right away. A couple of seconds might have been the difference.”

“He’s out of the woods?” Trace asked.

“I don’t know.” Matteson shrugged. “Ask me in twenty-four hours. The first day is always touch and go ’cause so many things can go wrong. Heart attacks aren’t always logical.”

“No cause, no explanation?”

“Right. Anything. Nothing. It just happens. It’s so hard to figure out what makes the body work, and with old people, well, it’s not working good to start with and you just don’t know. I hate medicine. You’re supposed to be God and you’re not God, you’re just blundering around in the dark, trying to do the best you can, and you’ve got ladies like that one in there and they think you can do what you can’t do. I mean, you’re as powerless as anybody else is.”

“You saved one life today.”

“Yeah. That’s today. I was lucky to be here. I was lucky you had the good sense to call me right away. You want a guarantee? I can’t give you a guarantee. Maybe I won’t be here the next time. Or you won’t. I don’t know. I don’t know why I do this,” Matteson said.

“Is this the way it was with Plesser?” Trace asked.

“Plesser? Oh. Yeah. But nobody was here and so nobody called me and he just died and nobody helped him. Maybe we couldn’t anyway. I’m getting out of this damned business.”

“If you didn’t want to deal with death, why’d you get involved with old folks?” Trace asked. “You know you’re going to lose some of them.” He noticed Matteson’s hands were shaking, as if in rage.

“Because that’s what I do. I don’t know. You think it’s for the money? You know what plastic surgeons make? You know, I could spend the rest of my life carving new noses and be a millionaire. You want fat out of your baggy eyes? Come to George Matteson. Service with a smile. I’ll screw every third good-looking woman to help my reputation. Nobody calls you for an emergency nose job. Nobody wakes you up in the middle of the night because somebody you’ve been holding by your fingertips, just this side of death, slipped away because you closed your eyes to take a rest. Nobody—Ahhh, I’m sorry, Tracy, I’m just tired.”

“You ought to get some rest, Doc.”

“Later. I’ve got too much to do.”

“Thanks for telling me about Jeannie,” Trace said.

“Yeah,” Matteson said. “Yeah.”

A few minutes after Dr. Matteson went back into Carey’s room, Muffy came out and leaned against the wall across from Trace and lit a cigarette.

“Still think he’s trying to kill Mr. Carey?”

“Maybe not this time,” she said. “We all were there.”

“Come on. Park it, kid,” Trace said.

“I never said it was him. Maybe somebody else around here. He sure isn’t getting any better staying in this dump. He was better at the hospital.” She took a long pull of her cigarette, then stepped close to Trace to snuff it out in the large ashtray. “I’m going to call our night nurse and have him come down early.”

“A male nurse?” Trace said.

“Yeah. It’s his night off, but I want him around.”

“In case the crazed killers of Meadow Vista are prowling the corridors tonight?” Trace asked.

“Something like that,” Muffy said.

When Trace got back to the country club, he had three messages waiting for him. One was from Jeannie Callahan and he realized she must have written it when leaving the club’s restaurant at lunchtime. It read, “Please call. Jeannie,” and left a telephone number. The number had a seven in it and she had drawn a line through the seven. The second message was from Chico and left a number for him to call. Another message left just a number, no name.

“No calls from Rome?”

“No, sir,” Dexter said.

“These’ll have to do, then.”

Trace lay the messages on his bed, looked at them, and dialed Jeannie Callahan’s number. It rang four times before a taped message clicked on.

He decided he even liked her voice as he listened to her very businesslike message, reporting the office’s working hours and asking that name, phone number, time of call, and nature of business be described in the thirty seconds after the beep tone.

The beep tone sounded and he said, “Did anyone ever tell you you’ve got a very sexy voice? This is Trace and I’m still staying at the Golden Age Golf Club. I think it’s rotten of you, cheating on me in public, but I’ve decided not to give you the beating you deserve and I’m going to forgive you instead. This offer’s only good for an hour. Call me. Unless I get you at your apartment instead. Then ignore this call.”

He hung up and looked in the local telephone book, but Jeannie’s home number was not listed.

He called Chico. The telephone number was a Holiday Inn in Memphis and her voice seemed glum as she answered.

“This is Trace. What’s up?”

“Hi, Trace. Just thinking of you.”

“That’s a nice thing for you to do every third day.”

“Want some company?” she asked.

“Why? You tired of your sister already?”

She hesitated before answering. “Oh, come on, Trace, you know I wasn’t here with my sister.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, and waited.

“You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

“You know me. I never make things easy for anybody,” he said.

“All right. That guy I was seeing the last couple of nights in Vegas?”

“The sweating greaseball with the bald spot? The one who kept his hands in his pockets all the time?” Trace said.

“You’re making that up.”

“Just a guess,” Trace said.

“He didn’t look anything like that.”

“No? Was he the man of your dreams?”

“Trace, this is hard enough. Will you shut up and listen?”

“Go ahead.”

“Anyway, that guy I was with, he offered me a job with his company.”

“Entertaining clients from out of town?”

“Goddamn you, Trace, that’s cruel.”

“Sorry,” he said impassively.

“He said that he ran a business that specialized in providing tests for students. You know, things like SATs. That’s exactly my field. My degrees are in that. And he needed a new sales manager. That’s what we talked about.”

“And you were going to leave my fireside in Las Vegas to go take a job in Memphis, Tennessee? Without talking to me?”

“I would have talked to you. I wanted to check it out first. Hey, I’m not twenty-one years old anymore.”

“No, you’re twenty-six.”

“How come you can’t remember that on my birthday? So I came down to talk to him about the job.”

“And you stayed with him for a couple of days and played house?” Trace said.

“All right. If you want to call it that.”

“I could call it something else. And there wasn’t a job, was there?”

“No, there wasn’t. It was all a load of crap.”

“He’s married too, right?” Trace said.

“Yeah. And his wife was in England visiting relatives and I had to get out before she came back,” Chico said.

“Is he paying the rent for the Holiday Inn?” Trace asked.

“He offered, but I wouldn’t let him.”

“Good girl. Preserve your shredded virtue. You know, for all your brainpower, you may be the dumbest hooker in the world,” Trace said. “Part-time hooker. Excuse me.”

“Okay, Trace, you want to rub my nose in it, go ahead. Yes, I’m a part-time hooker. And, yes, I’m tired of dealing blackjack to guys who want to trick with me, and I’m kind of getting tired of figuring out that you and me just aren’t going anywhere at all, and I thought this was a chance of making a good move for myself, and it just didn’t work out.”

Trace said nothing, and after a pause she asked, “So I asked you, do you want company?”

“Actually, I don’t think so. This whole case up here is pretty complicated.”

“I usually help out on the complicated ones,” she said. “And I’ve got a few days.”

“Naah. And, besides, the clerk here thinks I work for the Vatican. It’d blow everything if I had some woman booking in with me.”

“Tell him I’m the head of the Church in the Far East. If he believes you’re with the Vatican, he’ll believe anything.”

“It’d never work. You don’t have the shifty eyes of a prelate.”

“I could stay somewhere else,” she said. He could almost hear her shrug over the phone and he could picture her perfect tiny body and her soft face with the well-deep dark eyes and he wondered for a moment why he was playing nasty games with her.

“If you want to come,” he finally said, “there’s probably motels in some of the other towns around here. You’ll have to rent a car at Newark Airport and drive in yourself. I’m probably going to be busy. So call me after you get in and we’ll see if we can get together.”

“All right, Trace,” she said.

He hung up and looked at the other message. It was a simple seven-digit number with no area-code prefix. If Dexter had gotten it right, that meant whoever called had called from New Jersey. And who did he still know in New Jersey?

He dialed the number.

“Hello,” said a voice, and Trace nodded and slowly replaced the receiver, even as his ex-wife’s voice continued to bark, “Hello, hello. Is anybody there? It’s you, Devvie, isn’t it? It’s you, you bastard.”

Click.